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How else would you greet Joel Grey, the man who won both a Tony and an Oscar for his demonically delicious delivery of those words in Cabaret?

It’s Toronto’s good fortune he’s coming here for three nights for a special season opener for the Harold Green Jewish Theatre Company, Sept. 13 to 15, called Joel Grey: Up Close And Personal.

But in Grey’s case, the shopworn phrase is a real guarantee of what he’s been offering in his 73 years in show business: the real thing delivered with devotion and energy.

“I’ve been caring about performing and loving it since I saw a play at the Cleveland Playhouse when I was 8 years old and I knew it was what I was meant to do,” says Grey from his New York home.

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A year after that primal stage experience, he was playing his first role, in a production of On Borrowed Time in that very theatre.

You might want to admit that Grey had a bit of a head start because his father, Mickey Katz, was one of the last but most vibrant of the unabashedly Jewish comedians.

“My dad was a really funny, really talented guy who had a great success in a limited audience. But from him I learned that he always felt the audience was entitled to 150 per cent. If he was performing at an event, he’d keep playing until the last person had finished dancing.”

Grey learned another lesson from the response to his father’s unashamedly ethnic material.

“Looking back now, I can see that my dad was a real fighter. A lot of people thought, ‘Why don’t you keep the Jewish stuff quiet?’ They were anti-Semitic Jews. People who were afraid. People who came here and made it and anglicized themselves and didn’t want to associate with their past.

“But the past is the best, at least in terms of knowing who you were and where you came from.”

It was a lesson Grey would remember during the tryout days of Cabaret, but it took him a long time to get there.

For years, Grey was almost constantly employed as a singer and actor, but he was always the replacement, taking over major roles on Broadway in shows like Come Blow Your Horn and Stop the World — I Want To Get Off, but never originating one.

“I spent 15 years of not being able to get a job creating a role on Broadway,” says Grey, wistfully. “I thought that was going to be it. And after one terrible show called Mardi Gras, out at the Jones Beach Theatre, I finally realized it wasn’t going to happen and I decided to quit.”

But just in time came a fateful phone call from producer and director Hal Prince, who was working on a new musical version of Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories.

“I’m doing this play and there’s a part in that we all really think you’d be just swell in,” says Grey in a devilishly accurate impersonation of Prince. Grey laughs. “So when Hal Prince calls, you listen.”

When he went into rehearsal, he was playing a sleazy master of ceremonies in a Berlin cabaret, introducing and performing a series of numbers, “but they were all clustered together in Act II, like the Loveland sequence would later be in Follies. I don’t remember exactly when they decided to spread the numbers out throughout the whole show, but wow, it made all the difference.”

Cabaret is considered a landmark in the history of musical theatre, but nobody connected with the show was all that optimistic.

“It was a very unusual show for a Broadway musical. Nazis and anti-Semitism. It wasn’t a sure thing. The truth of the matter is, we opened up in Boston at the Shubert Theatre and none of us knew what the power of the show was. After the opening number, the audience whooped and hollered and we thought, ‘Well, that’s a good way to begin.’ Then they didn’t stop; they cheered every number.”

Still, in the middle of all the elation, there was a heavily charged event that nearly closed the show.

Grey sang a song called “If You Could See Her,” where he danced with a gorilla and sang of his love for her. All very funny until the closing line, “If you could see her through my eyes, she wouldn’t look Jewish at all.”

The protests that erupted over that one line in Boston were seismic.

“The B’nai B’rith misunderstood the lyric,” recalls Grey. “They thought it actually was anti-Semitic instead of being a powerful statement against anti-Semitism.”

Nowadays, that lyric remains in the show; at the time it was changed to “She isn’t a meeskite at all”: Yiddish for ugly girl. “We were all heartbroken by the change and I can’t tell you how many times I forgot to change it and sang the original lyric,” says Grey. “Ooops!” He giggles mischievously.

The show was a giant success and Grey woke up to find he was a star at the age of 34. Broadway vehicles were crafted for him, some like George M!, the story of entertainer George M. Cohan, were successes, although it was a tough road.

“Everybody remembered James Cagney from Yankee Doodle Dandy, but I didn’t know how to tap. I studied and worked, but I was nervous every night. I would go downstairs every night into the basement and practise my solo before I could start the show.”

Despite that show’s year-long run and several other entertaining Grey vehicles like Goodtime Charley and The Grand Tour, he found himself away from Broadway for 17 years, besides one brief revival of Cabaret. So he did lots of TV and movies and concentrated on his photography.

And then a one-two-three late career punch brought him back with a vengeance. First, he played Amos Hart in the epic revival of Chicago that is still playing. Next he opened in the role of The Wizard in Wicked in New York (now playing in Toronto and in its 11th year on Broadway), but he was initially reluctant to do so.

“I didn’t want to do long runs any more, but (director) Joe Mantello and (producer) David Stone came to my apartment and said, ‘We’re not leaving until you say yes.’ And so I did.

“It’s a smart show and I loved doing it. My two favourite moments? I loved singing ‘Wonderful’ with Idina (Menzel), who is very special, and I also was very moved by the song ‘A Sentimental Man’ because it revealed the Wizard as a father, which was something I loved to play.”

Despite his alleged aversion to long runs, Grey went into the hit revival of Anything Goes in 2011 and enjoyed that experience mightily as well.

“You know something,” he says with sly pride, “for a few years there were three shows running on Broadway that I had all opened: Chicago, Wicked and Anything Goes. That’s nice at this point in my career.

“What keeps me going? Show business. I’m still learning it and still loving it.”

Joel Grey: Up Close and Personal will be at the George Weston Recital Hall in the Toronto Centre for the Arts, 5040 Yonge St., from Sept. 13 to 15. Go to www.hgjewishtheatre.com or call 1-855-985-2781 for tickets and information.

FIVE FAVE ROLES

CABARET

“When I made such a big success after all those years as a replacement, it was such a vindication. It made it all seem worthwhile.”

GEORGE M!

“Usually they say when a president comes to visit a show, it extends the run by six months. Well Richard Nixon came to see us and we closed six weeks later.”

GOODTIME CHARLEY

“So much of that show was wonderful. Ann Reinking was delicious, I had a super entrance and a great final number. Why didn’t it work? You tell me.”

THE GRAND TOUR

“Another heartbreaker. I think sometimes a show can just open at the wrong time. I think that’s what happened there.”

WICKED

“Someone asked me once if I was playing George Bush. Never. I was playing the man behind the curtain. Just like in the movie.”

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